FAQs

$220 for a 50 minute individual session

$275 for a 50 minute couples/multi-person session

Longer sessions are available for a corresponding increased rate.

My session rate allows me to offer premium quality care to every single one of my clients and supports my capacity for number of sessions each week.

Each client is entitled to a Good Faith Estimate and will receive one along with their intake forms.

I believe this is the course of action that is most aligned and keeps me in integrity with my values as a clinician and the type and quality of care I seek to provide to my clients.

Privacy First and foremost, it is my belief that therapy is a private encounter, exclusively between a therapist and a client. Trust is an essential ingredient in therapy. As soon as insurers are asked to pay for treatment, they are entitled to ask for (and be granted) access to private therapy records.

In my experience, knowing this is a possibility or an eventuality can be a subtle, but significant deterrent to trust, and therefore, to feeling safe in session and moving toward progress. The nature of my practice is working with increasingly sensitive issues (like disordered eating, body image, sexuality, significant trauma, identity, etc) that require a solid sense of safety in order to address in therapy. It is of the utmost importance to me to be able to offer as close to a 100% guarantee of privacy and confidentiality as humanly possible.

Autonomy I work for you, the client, and that means I will provide care and services that are clinically appropriate for you specifically, based on my professional expertise and collaboration with you. If I accepted insurance, I would work for the insurance company, not for you. In turn, the insurance company may decline authorization of sessions because you aren’t progressing fast enough, our work in psychotherapy does not qualify as a “medical necessity,” or my treatment approach isn’t recognized by the insurance company as an “evidence-based treatment” (which is usually code for short term, 6-12 sessions). Rather than giving you the care that best meets your needs, I would be responsible to the insurance company for “completing” your treatment within the pre-determined number and type of sessions.

Protection for Clients Health insurance requires you to be “mentally ill.” Insurance companies require mental health care providers to diagnose their clients by using a pathologizing code from the DSM-5. That diagnosis will become a permanent part of your health care record. Don’t get me wrong, knowing and understanding your diagnosis (if you meet criteria for one) can be helpful and empowering for you as a client, but putting a diagnosis on your health record can have the opposite effect.

Life insurance underwriters, certain sensitive government positions, the military, certain professional schools, and others will demand and gain access to your medical records. When you give permission to access your medical records, and you used insurance to cover psychotherapy, the dates and length of your therapy, and very possibly your diagnosis, will be revealed. A friend of mine just had this happen when they applied for life insurance and had their options limited due to a diagnosis on record from using health insurance for therapy.

I wish we lived in a world in which psychological concerns and psychotherapy were completely destigmatized. Perhaps one day we will, but we are not there yet, and until we are I cannot in good conscience participate in the same system that I am advocating to change.

Some therapists who do not accept insurance will offer clients a statement to submit to their insurance provider for direct reimbursement, which is called a superbill. However, that superbill still must contain a mental illness diagnosis and the type and length of sessions attended. This option does not resolve issues concerning confidentiality and your medical record. It offers more protection in that the insurance company cannot read my notes and gather specific information about our sessions, but a diagnosis is still added to your record, along with your appointment history. It is my preferred practice to not provide a superbill for these reasons.

If you require a superbill for out of network filing and you have confirmed that I qualify as an out of network provider with your insurance, I will provide you with an additional consent form to complete before producing your superbill.

I do not communicate with client insurance carriers directly. All superbills are provided to you, the client, and you will submit that to your insurance company. If your insurance company tells you they need to speak with the provider before approving out of network reimbursement, I will not be able to do that.

Yes! You may use your HSA/FSA account and card to pay for your therapy sessions. While receipts are usually required to show that you spent the money on an accepted service/product, those receipts do not require a diagnosis, just a line item of what you paid for, such as “90834: Psychotherapy, 45-50 minutes.” I am comfortable providing those receipts to you if you need them.

All major credit cards, HSA/FSA cards, cash, and personal checks. The price for sessions is the same no matter how you pay.

If you choose to pay with cash or check, please know that an active, functional credit card is required to be kept on file for all clients.

We use HIPAA-compliant credit card processors to store sensitive credit card data, and payments are integrated into the health record system (Jane) for easy and secure billing. Once you have added a card, only the last 4 digits of the card will be visible to the practice; we will never have access to your entire credit card number.

Payment is due at the time of the session. Clients may not carry balances on their accounts.

I recommend meeting weekly, at the very least to start out, so that we can get to work on building up trust and safety so we can dig into your reasons for coming to therapy.

Sometimes people worry that if they meet with me every week, they won’t have anything to talk about if nothing major happens between sessions—but that’s the goal! When your mind isn’t leading the charge, it creates space for the body to where there is work to be done. The kind of therapy work I do involves excavating deeply buried issues and beliefs, and rewiring your ways of being, and it is difficult to adequately address those things if we are always dealing with the latest crisis or major event. As a result, I have found that the best, deepest, and most fruitful sessions are the ones when someone comes in with “nothing major to talk about.”

When you have therapy sessions less often, sometimes a chunk of the session is spent on catching me up on what’s happened in your life since we last met, before we can get to the therapeutic meat of the session. Also, it can take a longer amount of time to see meaningful results in your life if we meet less frequently. For example, meeting weekly for 3 months gives you ~12 sessions, whereas meeting monthly gives you 3 sessions—in the same time span, you can get 4 times as much therapy work done with weekly sessions.

At the same time, I do think some therapy is better than no therapy. If you can’t commit to weekly sessions because of time or budget constraints, you are still welcome to meet with me at a different interval that we both agree on after a discussion about your therapy goals. Ultimately, it comes down to what you are looking to get out of therapy and how much you are willing and able to invest financially.

While I can’t give you a clear and precise answer to that question, what I can tell you is that the kind of transformational clinical work I do is not conducive to short-term therapy. Working with the nervous system and the body to expand capacity can be a slower process. If trauma can be understood as “too much too fast,” we need to slow down and respect limits and boundaries in order to heal trauma.

For the issues I specialize in, there is no “quick fix.” The undoing and rewiring of years and decades of trauma, maladaptive coping, and overwhelming lack of trust in yourself cannot be accomplished in 6-12 sessions. You will make progress in 6-12 sessions, but if it took you years to get here, it’ll take more than a few months to make your way out.

If you are wanting a deadline for “finishing” therapy, I may not be the therapist for you. If you are ready to commit to transforming your life and freeing yourself, no matter how long the process takes, we can do great things together.

Your appointment time is reserved just for you. I require 48 hours notice for any cancellations or changes to your appointment. Clients who provide less than 48 hours notice, or miss their appointment, will be charged for the full cost of the appointment: $200 for individual sessions and $250 for couples/multi-person sessions. If you have reserved a longer appointment, your cancellation fee will match what you would have paid for your extended session.

This cancellation policy is really important for my counseling practice because, while a medical doctor can see 35 patients in a day, a therapist like me generally sees a maximum of 4 or 5. I reserve for you, and all my clients, at least a full hour of my time for the session (50 minutes) and clinical notes (10 minutes). If a client cancels with less than a 48 hour notice, I won’t be able to fill that time slot, and I’ll lose that slot from my work schedule. The fee exists simply to ensure that I am paid for my time that was reserved especially for you. The cancellation fee is not a penalty or a punishment, and I want to make sure you don’t view it as such in the event that you miss an appointment. If you’re in counseling long enough, at some point it’ll happen– maybe you’ll work late, maybe you’ll have a health situation to tend to, maybe something unavoidable will come up.

I’m never upset with clients when they miss an appointment. I know life happens. In return, my clients understand that scheduling an appointment with me is like buying tickets to an event. If you miss the event, it doesn’t matter why you missed it, or even if it was your first time, you can’t turn in your tickets for a refund. While some therapists apply their cancellation policy on a case-by-case basis, I personally choose not to evaluate each individual case. Deciding whether to “waive” the fee or not puts me in the unfortunate role of being the judge of what’s “legitimate” or “sick” or “emergency” enough, which impacts the therapeutic relationship negatively. If you know that I “could” waive the fee, you end up resentful when you are charged and I end up feeling I need to justify the reasons for my choice. Consistency in charging the fee ensures all personal feelings are kept out of it, so our work together in therapy can continue untouched by one of us feeling slighted by the other.

My office is located at 6263 Poplar Avenue, Suite 605, Memphis, TN 38119—very centrally located for all clients from Downtown to Collierville, and super easy to get to since it’s right at the Poplar/240 interchange.

I am proud to share a space with my friends and esteemed colleagues at Memphis Nutrition Group. Setting up my therapy practice within their space was a natural fit, since the goals of our respective practices are aligned: nourish your whole self, live freely, reject diet culture, and trust yourself and your own body.

DIRECTIONS

My office inside Memphis Nutrition Group is located on Poplar Avenue in the Poplar Towers Building next to Fleming's Restaurant. The eleven-story Poplar Towers Building is across the street from Paragon Place Shopping Center (near Chick-fil-a). The office is located on the sixth floor in Suite #605.

From Collierville/Germantown, drive East on Poplar. Pass through the intersection at Poplar & Massey, and you'll see Poplar Towers on your left.

From Downtown/Midtown/East Memphis, drive West on Poplar. Pass through the intersection at Poplar and Ridgeway, and you'll see Poplar Towers on your right shortly after passing Regalia shopping center and before getting to the Poplar & Massey intersection.

Yes! Virtual sessions are available at any time. You can schedule a virtual session in advance, or if you schedule an in-person session and need to switch it to virtual last minute, that is just fine.

You can either click the “Book A Session” button at the top or bottom of this web page, or go to https://kirstencannon.janeapp.com/ to access my schedule and book an appointment. From there, you’ll make a client account and fill out the intake forms that get added to your profile.